This page contains one or more sections that are English Wikipedia policies. These sections are each individually marked with the Policy section template. Sections of this page that are not marked as such are not considered policies.

This page in a nutshell: Please sign your posts on talk pages, using ~~~~. Keep the coding of your signature short, do not make the signature too large, do not embed files in it, and ensure that the end result is easily readable by virtually everybody.

Signing your posts on talk pages (normally using ~~~~), both for the article and non-article namespaces, is good practice, and facilitates discussion by helping identify the author of a particular comment. Other users can then navigate to a talk page and address their comments to the specific, relevant user(s). Discussion is an important part of collaborative editing, because it helps all users to understand the progress and evolution of a work.

Comments posted on user talk pages, article talk pages and other discussion pages should be properly signed. Signature use that is intentionally and persistently disruptive may lead to blocking under the disruptive editing policy.

When editing a page, main namespace articles should not be signed, because the article is a shared work, based on the contributions of many people, and one editor should not be singled out above others.

Purpose of signatures

Signatures on Wikipedia identify you as a user and your contributions to Wikipedia. They encourage civility in discussions by identifying the author of a particular comment and the date and time at which it was made. Because of that, having an uncivil signature is strongly discouraged (in some cases, to the point of blocking the user until it is changed). In general, anything that is not allowed in a user name should not be used in a signature either.

Furthermore, signatures also serve a technical purpose: various user scripts and talk-page archiving bots, including lowercase sigmabot, rely on their time stamps to know when to archive old threads. It's because of this that it's also important to avoid overly customizing the date output of a signature, as doing so can lead to stale threads persisting long after they'd otherwise be archived.

When signatures should and should not be used

Any posts made to the user talk pages, article talk pages and any other discussion pages must be signed. Edits to articles must not be signed, as signatures on Wikipedia are not intended to indicate ownership or authorship of any article. Rather, the page history takes care of the need to identify edits with users. Therefore, signatures should not be used in edit summaries, as they do not translate from ~~~~. In other instances, when posts should not be signed, specific instructions are provided to contributors.

Since typing four tildes adds the time and date to your resulting signature, this is the preferred option for signing your posts in discussions.

Note that if you choose to contribute without logging in, regardless of whether you have an account, you should still sign your posts. In this case your IP address will take the place of your username, and will link to your contributions history. Your IP address might look something like 192.0.2.213 or 2001:DB8:CEEE:21B:DB60:07FE:4277:63FF.

Other options

Using three tildes

However, since this does not date-stamp your signature, you may wish to sign this way only when leaving general notices on your user page or user talk page. This is also a convenient shortcut (rather than typing out the full code) when you want to provide a link to your user page.

Using five tildes

Typing five tildes will convert to a date stamp with the current date and time, without adding your signature, like this:

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~~~~~

15:10, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

15:10, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

In general, when communicating with others, you should use one of the previous options, and not only a timestamp. There are exceptions to this such as, when requesting assistance from the Third Opinion project the requested format for signing is the five tilde signature to slightly help improve neutrality from the responding volunteer.

Customizing your signature

Unregistered/not-logged-in users who sign manually with a pseudonym or tag such as --anon. or 192.58*, still have their IP address stored in the page history. If you choose to sign in that way, to make it easier for other users to communicate with you, you should still type four tildes: --192.58*~~~~.

Customizing how you see your signature

To change how your signature appears to you when you are logged-in, but not to other users, you can create a personal "CSS" style sheet for your own convenience. For example, to display your username in bold reversed out of orange (like this: Your_user_name), add the following to Special:MyPage/common.css, replacing Your_user_name with your actual username:

When you use this technique a highlight will be displayed wherever you sign a talk-page post, and also anywhere [[User:Your_user_name]] appears, e.g. in your watchlist, in page histories, and if anyone links to you in a discussion. As you are the only person who will see your custom signature, you can use a bright color to help you scan long pages more quickly. Alternative colors can be researched via the Web colors article.

You can remove or modify the highlighting effect at any time by changing the instruction from your style sheet. The change will apply to all pages regardless of how old they may be.

Customizing how everyone sees your signature

Registered users can customize their signatures by going to Special:Preferences and changing the field "Signature". This changes the signature seen by everyone. It can be used to sign your posts with a nickname, or with custom formatting, or both.

This technique only applies where you have signed a page while logged in. It doesn't affect how your username appears in your watchlist, in page histories, or where someone else has linked to your user page in a discussion. When you remove or modify your signature, the change will apply to your future posts, but the signatures on your existing posts will be unchanged.

If you do not check the "Treat the above as wiki markup" box, the exact content you enter will be used as your signature. For example, if User:Example had set their signature to read NICKNAME, thereafter the signature (generated when they mark a post with ~~~~) would be:

If you check the "Treat the above as wiki markup" box, you can describe your signature using "raw" wikitext (such as <span> and wiki-markup) which will be substituted unchanged when you sign your posts. If User:Example had set their signature to read [[User:Example|Ex@''mple'']]<sup>[[User talk:Example|t@lk]]</sup>, the signature generated by ~~~~ would be:

Because these signatures are seen by everyone, be aware of the guidelines and policies below.

When customizing your signature, please keep the following in mind: A distracting, confusing, or otherwise unsuitable signature may adversely affect other users. For example, some editors find that long formatting disrupts discourse on talk pages, or makes working in the edit window more difficult. Complicated signatures contain a lot of code ("markup") that is revealed in the edit window, and can take up unnecessary amounts of narrative space, which can make both reading and editing harder. The WMF's "Flow" project (which will replace the current Wikipedia talk page system) probably won't support custom signature formatting (details).

Signature forgery

This section documents an English Wikipedia policy, a widely accepted standard that all editors should normally follow. Changes made to it should reflect consensus.

Never use another editor's signature. Impersonating another editor by using his or her username or signature is forbidden. Altering the markup code of your signature to make it look substantially like another user's signature may also be considered a form of impersonation. Editing the code of your signature to link it to another editor's user page is not permitted. It is also ineffective, as the change log of the page records the IP address and (if applicable) username of all editors; as such, any impersonators can easily be caught if the signature in the diff view differs from the editor's default signature. While not an absolute requirement, it is common practice for a signature to resemble to some degree the user name it represents.

If you encounter a user whose signature is disruptive or appears to be impersonating another account, it is appropriate to ask that user to consider changing their signature to meet the requirements of this policy. When making such a request, always be polite, and assume good faith. Do not immediately assume that the user has intentionally selected a disruptive or inappropriate signature. If you are asked to change your signature, please avoid interpreting a polite request as an attack. Since the success of Wikipedia is based on effective teamwork, both parties should work together to find a mutually acceptable solution.

Signature formatting has been the subject of Requests for Comment, and has also resulted in some very heated debates. In one case a user who refused to cease using "~~~~" as a signature was required to change it by the Arbitration Committee. This is an extreme measure for refusal to cooperate with reasonable requests, and should be considered a last resort. When dealing with potentially problematic signatures, simply being polite is often sufficient and can prevent the situation from escalating into a dispute.

Appearance and color

This section documents an English Wikipedia policy, a widely accepted standard that all editors should normally follow. Changes made to it should reflect consensus.

Your signature must not blink, scroll, or otherwise cause inconvenience to or annoy other editors.

Avoid markup such as <big> and <span style="font-size: 200%;">(or more) tags (which enlarge text); this is likely to disrupt the way that surrounding text displays.

Do not add line breaks (<br />, which can also negatively affect nearby text display. The use of non-breaking spaces to ensure that the signature displays on one line is recommended.

Be sparing with subscript and superscript. In some cases, this type of script can also affect the way that surrounding text is displayed.

Do not make your signature so small that it is difficult to read.

As some users have vision problems, be sparing with color. If you use different colors in your signature, please ensure that the result will be readable by people with color blindness, defective color vision, and other visual disabilities.[note 1]

Do not include horizontal rules (---- or <hr />).

For guidance on how to use color and other effects to customize the appearance of your signature, see this tutorial.

Length

Extremely long signatures with a lot of HTML/wiki markup make page editing and discussion more difficult for the following reasons:

Signatures that take up more than two or three lines in the edit window clutter the page and make it harder to distinguish posts from signatures.

Long signatures give undue prominence to a given user's contribution.

Signatures which have long HTML/wiki markup and contain no spaces cause other editors' edit boxes to show unnecessary horizontal scrollbars (such signatures may have spaces added to them by any editor).

Signatures that occupy more space than necessary in the edit box displace meaningful comments, thus forcing editors to scroll when writing their replies.

The presence of such long signatures in the discussion also disrupts the reading of comments when editors are formulating their replies.

The software will automatically truncate both plain and raw signatures to 255 characters of code in the signature box. If substitution of templates or another page is used, please be careful to verify that you are not violating the length limit, as the software will not do this automatically.

Over-riding custom signatures

Unclutter signature minimiser

Custom-styled Unclutter and Comments in Local Time reformatting signatures and timestamps in a Wikipedia discussion.

If you prefer not to see other users' custom signatures, you can use the custom JavaScript module Unclutter. By default, Unclutter scans non-special non-article pages for timestamped signatures, wraps them up and replaces with a text of the form:

Using custom CSS

It's also possible to use your personal common.css style sheet to override the formatting of other users' signatures.

This allows you to decide how links to user pages should be displayed to you when you are logged-in. For example, you could highlight Your user name in bold reversed mauve and Other signatures in normal mauve. This approach works by reversing a variety of commonly used signature formatting techniques, but it doesn't attempt to replace the text content of the signature. For example, if User:Example has customized their signature to read Ex@mple, changing the formatting would display Ex@mple rather than their actual name Example.

No other users will see your custom effects. You can remove or modify them at any time by changing the instructions in your style sheet. The change will apply to all pages regardless of how old they may be. For an example stylesheet, see User:Pointillist/reformat-signatures.css.

Links

Internal links

Signatures must include at least one direct internal link to your user page, user talk page, or contributions page; this allows other editors easy access to your talk page and contributions log. The lack of such a link is widely viewed as obstructive.

If, while making modifications, you accidentally disable this link, see Wikipedia:How to fix your signature. When you insert your signature on your talk page or user page, a link to that page will appear black, bold and inactive, so test your signature elsewhere, such as the Sandbox.

Disruptive links

It is better to put information on your user page rather than in your signature. Brief additional internal links are generally tolerated when used to facilitate communication or to provide general information, but undesirable if seen as canvassing for some purpose.

Do not place any disruptive internal links (especially when combined with custom formatting, for example CLICK HERE!!!) in your signature.

External links

Mass posting of links to a particular website is strongly discouraged on Wikipedia. Posting a link to an external website with each comment you make on a talk page could be taken as link spamming, or an attempt to improve your website's ranking on search engines (which doesn't actually work in the first place). If you want to tell other Wikipedians about a website with which you are associated, you can do so on your user page.

Transclusion of templates (or other pages)

Certain automated scripts (bots) are used to automatically archive particularly active talk pages. These bots read the source of the talk page, but don't transclude templates, and so don't recognize the template as a signature.

Signature templates are vandalism targets, and will be forever, even if the user leaves the project.

Signature templates are a small but unnecessary drain on the servers. Transcluded signatures require extra processing—whenever you change your signature source, all talk pages you have posted on must be re-cached.

Non-Latin usernames

Editors with non-Latin usernames are welcome to edit in Wikipedia. However, non-Latin scripts, such as Arabic, Armenian, Chinese, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Indic scripts, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Thai and others, are illegible to most other contributors of the English Wikipedia. Not everyone uses a keyboard that has immediate access to non-Latin characters, and names that cannot be pronounced cannot be retained in memory. As a courtesy to the rest of the contributors, users with such usernames are encouraged to sign their posts (at least in part) with Latin characters. For an example refer to User:Παράδειγμα, who signs his posts as Παράδειγμα/Paradigma.

A signature consisting of or ending with characters from a right-to-left script will appear when viewing pages as --DD ,HH:MM (NAME) Month YYYY and in the edit box as --[[User:Example|DD ,HH:MM (NAME) Month YYYY]]. Adding a left-to-right marker symbol, at the end of the raw signature (HTML code: &lrm;), will resolve this. Or, if you include both Latin and a right-to-left script, such as Hebrew or Arabic, in your signature, consider putting Latin second, where it will be directly next to the timestamp.

Dealing with unsigned comments

The templates {{unsigned}} and {{unsignedIP}} can be used at the end of an unsigned comment to attach the username or IP to the comment. None of these templates automatically populate (fill in) the name or IP of the poster and the time of the post. That information is best copied from the history page and pasted into the following templates. Note: All of the unsigned templates must be substituted.

The templates {{unsigned2}} and {{unsignedIP2}} do almost the same as {{unsigned}} and {{unsignedIP}} when used with two parameters, but the ordering of the parameters is reversed. The resulting display is the same. These templates may be useful when copying and pasting from the edit history, where the timestamp appears before the username.

It is also a good idea to notify users, especially new users, that they should sign their comments. You may use the template {{uw-tilde}} on the user's talk page or one of the welcome messages for new users.

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{{subst:uw-tilde}}

{{subst:uw-tilde}}

Hello and welcome to Wikipedia. When you add content to talk pages and Wikipedia pages that have open discussion (but never when editing articles), please be sure to sign your posts. There are two ways to do this. Either:

With the cursor positioned at the end of your comment, click on the signature button ( or ) located above the edit window.

This will automatically insert a signature with your username or IP address and the time you posted the comment. This information is necessary to allow other editors to easily see who wrote what and when.

Thank you.

{{subst:uw-tilde|Article|Additional text}}

{{subst:uw-tilde|Article name|Comments go here.}}

Hello and welcome to Wikipedia. When you add content to talk pages and Wikipedia pages that have open discussion (but never when editing articles), such as at Article name, please be sure to sign your posts. There are two ways to do this. Either:

With the cursor positioned at the end of your comment, click on the signature button ( or ) located above the edit window.

This will automatically insert a signature with your username or IP address and the time you posted the comment. This information is necessary to allow other editors to easily see who wrote what and when.

Comments go here.

Also, the template {{undated}} can be used at the end of comments where the user gave his or her username but no timestamp:

Dealing with problematic signatures

Wikipedia's Username policy describes accepted practices and behavior in naming and operating a user account on Wikipedia that apply to both usernames and signatures. A purpose of your signature is to identify you as a contributor. If your signature is unnecessarily confusing, editors may request that you change it. Our guidelines for talk page usage also permit editors to change signatures that contravene this guideline back to the standard form. An editor with a confusing signature may be blocked sooner than usual for other inappropriate behavior such as disruption or vandalism, if their confusing signature contributes to the disruption.

Signatures that link to, but do not display, the user's username (for example by signing with a nickname, as in [[User:Example|User:Nickname]] or [[User:Example|Nickname]]) can be confusing for editors (particularly newcomers). The actual username always appears in the page history, so using just the nickname on the relevant talk page can make your signed comments appear to be from a different person. Alternatives include changing your username and including your account name in addition to the username, e.g. in the form [[User:Example|User:Example]]/Nickname.

Persistent failure to sign may become disruptive, and if it is persistent, despite the problems being pointed out to the user, doing so may be subject to sanctions.

See also

Notes and references

^If the browser's settings don't allow JavaScript, the icons appear only if the settings are changed. If the browser is set not to show pictures, the icon can be found on "Your signature with timestamp"